| By Matt Keller (Matt K) |
Tue Dec 16, 2008 10:18pm 
As far as soccer management games go, Sports Interactive has been the group to watch with their Championship Manager and Football Manager series. They’re not the only game in town though – EA has been plugging away at it for the last couple of years with Total Club Manager, now called FIFA Manager. The EA brand of football management is nowhere near as popular as their regular football sims, but as FIFA Manager 09 proves, they’re making progress with each passing year.
[ READ MORE ]
| By Matt Keller (Matt K) |
Mon Dec 15, 2008 9:45pm
Nintendo has had the Midas touch with casual gaming in the last four years, having experienced runaway success with Nintendogs, Brain Training, Wii Sports and many more. Some gamers have started to become a little vindictive towards the publisher, feeling rejected due to Nintendo’s focus on the new market at the expense of producing more traditional gaming titles. Inevitably Nintendo had to slip up some time, and Wii Music is its first major mistake.
[ READ MORE ]
| By Christian Read (mrread) |
Sun Dec 14, 2008 6:05pm
Lips, the latest in a long line of party games designed to make you parade a lack of musical talent in front of people in public, is a schizophrenic mixture of innovation and an almost blind, willing lack of understanding of the market. Yes, it serves perfectly well as a karaoke game. You sing, there's special moves, your friends laugh at you. But as a game that you play, with friends and in person, it has nothing at all.
[ READ MORE ]
| By Kingsley Foreman (UgLyPuNk) |
Sun Dec 14, 2008 12:04pm
The Command & Conquer: Red Alert series has to be one of the longest-running popular real time strategy games that hasn’t been blessed by a Blizzard development team. Originally created by Westwood Studios in the mid-90s, the unusual storyline could only have been dreamed up by the last men standing at the end of a keg party, as they theorise over what would happen if history was turned upside down while trying to stand to make their way to the soft couch before crashing for the evening.
[ READ MORE ]
| By Matt Keller |
Sat Dec 13, 2008 8:20pm
In the last three years, Guitar Hero has taken the rhythm game from niche genre to pop culture phenomenon. However, Guitar Hero developer Harmonix and manufacturer Red Octane split ways after the third outing, prompting Harmonix to up the ante with Rock Band, which took the concept of Guitar Hero and incorporated it into a band setting. Not wanting to be left behind, Activision and Neversoft have decided to go toe to toe with Harmonix and MTV by incorporating those same band elements, plus a few tricks of their own in Guitar Hero: World Tour.
[ READ MORE ]
| By Matt Keller |
Sat Dec 13, 2008 7:49pm
After a year of uncertainty, Harmonix, MTV and Electronic Arts finally decided to get off their collective arses and release Rock Band in Australia. The good news is that we get a year’s worth of downloadable tracks available from the day we pop the disc in. The bad news is that everybody else in the world is already playing Rock Band 2, and the whole concept is no longer as fresh as it was a year ago, particularly with the presence of Guitar Hero: World Tour. That doesn’t necessarily make Rock Band a bad game – in fact, it’s rather good.
[ READ MORE ]
| By Steven Perdikis (holo`) |
Thu Dec 11, 2008 8:38pm
Grand Theft Auto IV, as you probably already know, is one of the most celebrated console releases of recent times. When Rockstar announced the game was also coming to PC, there was much rejoicing, along with whispered concerns regarding the possibility of it being “just another console port”. The more optimistic members of the gaming community, driven by sales figures and strong reviews, proclaimed that it would be “the best thing to happen in PC gaming this year”.
[ READ MORE ]
| By Matt Keller (Matt K) |
Sun Dec 7, 2008 6:19pm
Disaster: Day of Crisis was one of the first games announced by Nintendo for the Wii. However, as Wii fever began to overtake the general populace, the publisher grew dissatisfied with the game, and ordered developer Monolith Soft (the Xenosaga one, not the F.E.A.R. one) to retool the game to better fit the Wiinew console. After disappearing for a couple of years, Disaster has suddenly been released, and as the name suggests, the result is catastrophic.
[ READ MORE ]
| By Matt Keller (Matt K) |
Wed Dec 3, 2008 5:02pm
The instant the Wii Remote was first revealed the video game industry looked at LucasArts in unison, and shouted “Star Wars lightsaber game!” LucasArts, too busy destroying the narrative of the original trilogy of films with The Force Unleashed, shrugged off these suggestions, and deemed it an impossible task due to what they felt was a lack of necessary feedback required when using a 1:1 control interface. Krome Studios, the team in charge of developing the Wii version of The Force Unleashed, obviously felt otherwise, proposing that lightsaber combat could be handled by using gestures. Somewhere along the line, LucasArts decided to take Krome’s duel mode from The Force Unleashed and pop it into a game of its own to tie in with the new Clone Wars series. Then the new Wii Motion Plus add-on was announced, making it all irrelevant, so just like the associated series, Star Wars: The Clone Wars – Lightsaber Duels feels totally unnecessary.
[ READ MORE ]
| By Matt Keller (Matt K) |
Tue Dec 2, 2008 6:07pm
Developers of games based on James Bond movies face two major problems; the first is extending a two hour movie into a full length video game, while the second is dealing with filling the rather imposing shoes left by Rare’s GoldenEye 007. At first glance, it seems like Treyarch has all the answers, adapting both Casino Royale and Quantum of Solace to pad out the game based on the latter, and utilising the game engine from Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare, one of the best shooters of recent memory. Quantum of Solace provides a really fun, action packed experience, but it’s a bit too simplistic and short-lived to make a lasting impression.
[ READ MORE ]
| By Matt Williams (Not_Matt) |
Sun Nov 30, 2008 9:22pm
When the PS3 finally hit store shelves in Australia, there were only two key exclusives to justify your purchase in front of gloating Xbox 360 owners: Motorstorm and Resistance: Fall of Man. With both titles finally receiving well deserved sequels two years later, I’ve taken a look at Motorstorm: Pacific Rift, to see whether it still has what it takes to stay above the pack, or if its day in the sun has past.
[ READ MORE ]
| By Matt Keller |
Sat Nov 29, 2008 8:04pm
Konami’s Pro Evolution Soccer was once the critical darling of video game football, offering a more realistic and in-depth representation of the game as opposed to FIFA’s all style and no substance approach. Since the transition to the HD generation, FIFA has mounted a major comeback while Pro Evolution Soccer has struggled to make use of the more powerful hardware or add any new and meaningful features. Pro Evolution Soccer 2009 helps to restore some of the series’ credibility, but Konami has a lot to do before they can reclaim the football crown.
[ READ MORE ]
| By Matt Keller (Matt K) |
Fri Nov 28, 2008 5:59pm
THQ’s WWE SmackDown games have long been a major part of the publisher’s line-up. Interest and the subsequent quality of Vince McMahon’s brand of “sports entertainment” have declined rapidly in recent years, and the associated video games have followed in step. Every year, we are promised a better version of the game with all of the series’ age-old problems fixed, yet the end result always seems to be the same. WWE SmackDown vs. Raw 2009 does little to buck the trend.
[ READ MORE ]
| By Steven Perdikis (holo`) |
Tue Nov 25, 2008 5:45pm
The MotoGP series has been well respected in the past amongst racing fans for its faithful reproduction of the official championship. With the license for the game having recently changed hands from THQ to Capcom, the new management have had a few plans for the series, which have manifested in the newest instalment, MotoGP08.
Amongst these new plans, branching out from the PC and Xbox 360 as core platforms for the franchise has been at the top of the agenda, with the game now available on the PS3, which is the version that is covered in this review.
Amongst these new plans, branching out from the PC and Xbox 360 as core platforms for the franchise has been at the top of the agenda, with the game now available on the PS3, which is the version that is covered in this review.
[ READ MORE ]
| By Timmy Campbell (TheMeadow) |
Mon Nov 24, 2008 6:46pm
I remember the days of sitting around as a kid playing the older Golden Axe games. They were fun to play with your friends and hack n slash through the game’s challenging but fun experience. When Golden Axe: Beast Rider was announced I was a little excited but at the same time a little skeptical. The real question on my mind and many others was “Could it compare to the originals?” and the more I watched or read up on it the less and less I thought it would.
[ READ MORE ]
| By Timmy Campbell (TheMeadow) |
Thu Nov 20, 2008 5:51pm
After a long wait and a few setbacks, LittleBigPlanet has finally arrived and Sackboy has jumped out of his pod to greet us. I have been following this game for awhile and loved all the ideas that were put behind it. Usually when a developer talks about their ideas, something is lost in the translation and we never get to see it in the full version of the game. Luckily LittleBigPlanet isn’t one of those games and brings to the table a lot of innovation, humour and creativity.
[ READ MORE ]
| By Matt Keller (Matt K) |
Wed Nov 19, 2008 7:26pm
The original Gears of War stands out as one of the big success stories of the HD generation. The fast-paced action and gorgeous graphics won gamers over, and helped Unreal Engine 3.0 become one of the most widely used game engines in the industry. Under the gloss, however, lay a game with a few problems; a shallow, short single-player mode with plot that’s easy to miss and a number of frustrating sequences, and a multiplayer mode with serious balance and latency issues. Epic has taken these complaints on board, and spent the last two years figuring out ways to upgrade the Gears formula. The result is fantastic; not only is Gears of War 2 a worthy sequel, but it improves upon the original game in every way.
[ READ MORE ]
| By Matt Williams (Not_Matt) |
Wed Nov 12, 2008 6:17pm
In 2007, BioShock launched simultaneously on the PC and Xbox 360 to unanimous praise. A spiritual successor to the classic System Shock series, BioShock is a narrative-driven, first person adventure into the depths of social upheaval. With a deep, brooding atmosphere and a focus on flexible combat, BioShock was a hot contender for last year’s game of the year. Now one year on, PlayStation 3 owners finally have a version to call their own, but has it been worth the wait?
[ READ MORE ]
| By Matt Keller (Matt K) |
Tue Nov 11, 2008 6:05pm
Batman seems like the prime candidate for LEGOfication by Traveller’s Tales (which seems to now be dedicated to LEGO titles) – you’ve got 70 years of comic, TV and movie history to draw from, a bigger list of enemies than Richard Nixon and a ton of awesome gadgets and vehicles. As the fourth LEGO title by the developer in three years, and only three months since the last, it’s hard to not feel that the formula is a little fatigued. It’s not familiarity that proves to be LEGO Batman’s biggest issue, though.
[ READ MORE ]
| By Matt Williams (Not_Matt) |
Tue Nov 11, 2008 12:42pm
If you’ve never spent any time with the Duke, for shame. Awash with controversy and complaints upon release, Duke Nukem 3D hit the gaming scene with an orgy of violence, unashamed mature themes and a wise crackin’, trash talkin’ protagonist out to save the world from alien scum and rescue the babes. Devilishly naughty to play as a young teen, yes, but beneath the blood and boobs was the next great FPS to carry the torch from Doom and one of the last to use 2D sprites. Taking a break from their mad schedule to ensure Duke Nukem Forever is released in this lifetime, 3D Realms jumped back on board to bring back a classic and get fans in the mood for the Duke’s repugnant charm.
[ READ MORE ]
:: Next Page >>
More News
Suggest News
RSS Feeds
Digest Subscriptions
